Preaching

The alarm woke me for the first time in a long time. Since we were having a cookout following the service, we wanted to get up early to cook spaghetti before we left for church. During this time, Tsuneko called to see if I could come earlier than usual in order to attend a meeting to go over the service beforehand. I therefore left the house, spaghetti in hand, at 9 am, while Trudy stayed behind to finish getting the kids ready, following which time they would join me at church by 11.

I ended up getting there in plenty of time and took some time to look over my notes while I waited for the others to arrive. The service seemed to go well- after singing a few songs, I gave my message on “A Lesson from God’s Holy Mountain”, which was about Elijah being afraid and travelling on a long journey to Mt. Horeb. I related my points back to the things we had learned during our travels as well. After church, they fired up a few wood charcoal-filled grills and started making various dishes for lunch. For the main course, a flat pan was placed over one of the grills in order to stir fry yaki soba, beef mixed with noodles and vegetables.

After lunch, Trudy left with Tsuneko in order to go shopping at Costco, while the boys accompanied me to work. I wanted to go in and start my samples dialyzing so that I could get off to a good start the following day. It was about 4:30 by the time the three of us had taken the train from Mikuni to Kita Senri and then walked to my lab. Although what I needed to do did not take very long at all, we ended up staying there for the next 4 hours. Justin worked on copying the more than 800 pictures from his camera onto my computer at work and then posting them on the internet, while Brennan contented himself with reading, playing on the lap top computer I had brought, and messing around with his brother during the wait to upload pictures.

It was about 9:30 by the time we had taken the monorail home and rejoined Trudy there. Since we hadn’t been that hungry following our big lunch and therefore had not yet eaten dinner, we feasted from our newly replenished refrigerator and pantry before going to bed.